Into A Paris Quartier: Reine Margot's Chapel & Other Haunts of St.-Germain

INTRODUCTION

The world’s quintessential expatriate city, Paris has long held a special fascination for Americans. Offering an incomparable urban setting, a rich cultural legacy and a deep-rooted respect for artistic pursuits and individual freedom, the French capital has provided a stimulating environment for successive waves of celebrated American émigrés.

GUIDE MICHELIN, PARIS

As the traveler’s bible, the Guide Michelin, suggests, maybe the feeling Americans have for Paris is unlike that of other visitors. Maybe we need it more. The English, it seems, can take the city or leave it, full as it is of French people: Many an Englishman has harboured a secret admiration for Paris—if it were not for the Parisians, as the editor acknowledges. The Spanish, the Swedish are seldom seen here; these nations have beautiful places of their own. But the City of Light has haunted the American imagination from the days of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, the reflex of our aspirations, and, some might say, feelings of cultural inferiority or at least of newness. Paris has also occupied a significant place in our literature, from Henry James’s bemused innocents to Hemingway’s worldly pub-crawling expatriates.

And, like Jefferson’s, like Gertrude Stein’s, the American imagination has tended to fasten on a particular part of Paris: the Left Bank around the church of St.-Germain-des-Prés. Jefferson lived on Rue Bonaparte, just a few doors away on the street where I am living more than two hundred years later, and Franklin was around the corner on the Rue Jacob. The novelist Henry Miller, staying up the street in the Hotel St.-Germain—where Janet Flanner, the venerable New Yorker correspondent, also lived during part of her long sojourn in Paris—wrote a friend, I love it here, I want to stay forever…each day I will see a little more of Paris, study it, learn it as I would a book. It is worth the effort…. The streets sing, the stones talk. The houses drip history, glory, romance. I feel the same.

Paris has always been a refuge and escape for foreigners, somewhere better in some sense or another than where they were, whether politically, artistically, or psychologically; whether for the fashionable lesbians of the twenties, American drunks during Prohibition, political exiles like Milan Kundera, social exiles like Oscar Wilde, worldly writers like Edith Wharton, down-and-out English travelers like George Orwell, Russians like Ivan Turgenev and, after 1917, Vladimir Nabokov, or African Americans like James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, or Chester Himes. For these and countless others, Paris has always represented freedom and a superior grasp of things, an exemplary set of priorities that places living before other concerns, a sea of calm except when it boils up; but even during its upheavals the stranger is curiously spared, like the publisher Sylvia Beach, or Edith Wharton’s lover William Morton Fullerton, an old man staying on in Paris during the Second World War.

I recently wrote an introduction to a collection of selected short stories about Paris by American writers from Hemingway’s day to today (Americans in Paris: Great Short Stories of the City of Light, edited by Steven Gilbar), each story testifying to this special relationship between Americans and Paris. What struck me was that many of these stories were in fact about personal defeat. In most of them, the American finds he is not able to live up to the cultural demands, the Gallic eroticism (whether experienced or merely hoped for, and possibly somewhat apocryphal), the conflicting demands of home versus foreign temptation. The Americans in almost all these stories go home, like Chad Newsome in Henry James’s The Ambassadors, to face real life in the States, and will think wistfully forever after about what might have been, if only they had stayed, or had learned how to stay, in Paris. We are moved to ask: What is it about Paris? And what is eluding us at home?

PART ONE

Studying the Métro map

ST.-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS

St.-Germain-des-Prés. This old quarter on the Left Bank is known for its beautiful church as well as for its narrow streets, antique shops, restaurants, cafés and cellars. The church, the oldest in Paris, and the abbatial palace are all that remain of the famous Benedictine abbey.

GUIDE MICHELIN

The quarter of St.-Germain-des-Prés may be the most visited and written about of all Parisian neighborhoods, and at first it seemed to me that there was little to add about these oft-trodden precincts—the coffeehouses Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore, the church of St. Germain-des-Prés itself, the Luxembourg gardens, Brasserie Lipp…The ghosts of Sartre and de Beauvoir and Hemingway are surely tired of being invoked, the echo of Edith Piaf faintly but audibly protesting.

All these belonged to the recent past, the heyday that comes to people’s minds when you say St.-Germain-des-Prés, the era from the forties through the sixties, famous for jazz and existentialism. In many ways, those were not easy decades. France was liberated but damaged, rancorous, and poor, yet it seems to have been a time of excessive gaiety, camaraderie, artistic achievement, erotic freedom, and political change, the haunt of so many of the talented, beautiful, or merely energetic people whose names have come to be associated with it now—Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to be sure, but also the writers Boris Vian, Albert Camus, the model Bettina, African Americans like Richard Wright.

I have a friend, a painter now in her seventies who was one of the most beautiful and energetic members of the golden age of St.-Germain-des-Prés (others have told me; she wouldn’t say that of herself), who describes the life: You went every night not to just one but three or more fashionable night clubs, a certain regular itinerary that never changed, until tourists (mostly French) turned out to view the beautiful people at play, thereby spoiling it. No one had any money, so you drank very little, usually whiskey, but you ordered a baby, a mere drop, all you could afford. You danced—the music was jazz, often American jazz and often played by American musicians. There were dinner shows at the Club St. Germain, the Vieux Colombier…

It looks in photos of young women flying through the air, their New Look skirts ballooning, swung by skinny guys, as if the dance was the jitterbug. So much smoking! It almost hurts to imagine what the air was like in the Tabou, one of the most popular and famous nightclubs. At the Café de Flore, Sartre held forth, drinking and writing. He and de Beauvoir would stay there all day, especially in cold weather, and it is said they had their own telephone line. Those two, while appearing sociable, were working seriously at their philosophical writings—establishing the prevailing philosophy, existentialism, an elaboration of what in the less reflective partygoers was just nihilism and a devil-may-care attitude. The politics was communist—this was the gauche caviar, as well-heeled leftists would come to be called in Mitterand’s time.

It is hard now, in the glossy consumer paradise St. Germain has become, to imagine that frenetic life, and above all the intellectual spirit then. I suppose Greenwich Village, or Berkeley, or North Beach in San Francisco during the sixties, might have been equivalents nearer to home: a time of excitement, changing mores, political dissent. In Paris, people went to the Nuages bar—That’s just where you went, says my friend Marie-Claude, you meaning everyone but everyone could not mean all of Paris—it must have only meant the fashionable world of intellectuals and artists, welded into a kind of milieu that, looking back, seems to the outsider a milieu that would never have let one in, rather as in all those American short stories I have mentioned.

The famous Café de Flore

Alas, while the glamorous people were at the Tabou, someone had to be home cooking dinner. That was me during the sixties in California, a woman with small children, completely missing the zeitgeist, and it would have been me—and most of us, surely, during the reign of Sartre in Paris. What would one say to Jean-Paul Sartre anyway? It’s me now, frankly, still marginal, contentedly mooning around the side streets, communing with seventeenth-century Parisian architecture and buying groceries for dinner, instead of hanging out at the Café de Flore. People do hang out there, though, and also at the Café Bonaparte and Les Deux Magots, crowded with people drinking coffee or wine at any hour. They are mainly tourists, but they may have always been tourists, for above all this is the haven of the foreigner, the stranger, the escapee.

Sometimes I arrange to meet a friend at one of these cafés at the end of the day for tea or a kir royale, often enough to get a glimpse of this public, sociable French custom, and of these cafés where so much of politics and art got started, and now continue the very long traditions of this quartier. The Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots have been here since the nineteenth century.

The café life is partly a function of Paris being a walking city. Is this the place for a diatribe about the automobile? I didn’t realize until I came to Paris, and I’m convinced that most Californians (Americans in general?) don’t realize, because they don’t have an opportunity to enjoy, the richness of a life that allows them to walk everywhere, to learn how much more fascinating and more amusing it is to walk, stopping to stare into store windows, sitting down at a sidewalk café for a coffee, meeting someone you know by chance or by rendezvous. New Yorkers have this privilege, but do the rest of us? In most of our cities, where would you walk to? Would you be safe?

THE TIME OF THE THREE MUSKETEERS

La Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés. On a demoli pour la former un superb portail et des batîments conventuels du XVIIème siècle.

VIE ET HISTOIRE DU VIE ARRONDISSEMENT

Modern St.-Germain is lively and prosperous, yet it is the seventeenth century, still strangely present here, that establishes its character, and I find that to understand the way it is now, it’s necessary to try to see it as it was four hundred years ago. Since I have come to live on the Rue Bonaparte, the street that lies between Les Deux Magots—Hemingway’s hangout—and the church of St. Germain-des-Prés, I find that, beside the shades of Sartre and Piaf, there is another crowd of resident ghosts who urge themselves forward for recognition through four centuries. They include the Musketeers—d’Artagnan, Aramis, Athos, and Porthos; four queens—Catherine de Médicis, Marguerite de Valois (or de Navarre after her marriage to Henri de Navarre, later King Henri IV), Anne of Austria, and Marie de Médicis; the sinister Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu; Kings Louis XIII to XVI, many Henris; and numberless other misty figures in plumed hats whose fortunes and passions were enacted among the beautiful, imposing buildings of the seventeenth century still in this neighborhood. Theirs is the spirit that prevails today, and that moves me most.

In a way, I had been prepared for them. My particular connection to this Parisian neighborhood started in childhood, thousands of miles away; I was over thirty before I ever actually saw it, but when I did, I knew it well. Not that I was one of those good little French majors that had grown up dreaming of France, not at all. I am here by accident.

It was a Francophile librarian at the Carnegie Library in my hometown of Moline, Illinois, who placed in my